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Study Rules Out Global Warming Being a Natural Fluctuation With 99% Certainty
An anonymous reader writes "A study out of McGill University sought to examine historical temperature data going back 500 years in order to determine the likelihood that global warming was caused by natural fluctuations in the earth's climate. The study concluded there was less than a 1% chance the warming could be attributed to simple fluctuations. 'The climate reconstructions take into account a variety of gauges found in nature, such as tree rings, ice cores, and lake sediments. And the fluctuation-analysis techniques make it possible to understand the temperature variations over wide ranges of time scales. For the industrial era, Lovejoy's analysis uses carbon-dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels as a proxy for all man-made climate influences – a simplification justified by the tight relationship between global economic activity and the emission of greenhouse gases and particulate pollution, he says. ... His study [also] predicts, with 95% confidence, that a doubling of carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere would cause the climate to warm by between 2.5 and 4.2 degrees Celsius. That range is more precise than – but in line with — the IPCC's prediction that temperatures would rise by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius if CO2 concentrations double.'"
we cannot ascertain the temperatures of past centuries with enough precision to make any such study nor claims
earth2 has that hot chick and that guy that kinda looks like joey from Friends
lose != loose
Stop it! What I believe is what is real.
If I don't know, TV will tell me what to believe. And if they have "balanced discussions" with "experts on both sides", who cares about (un)certainties and such things. Clearly, the issue has not been decided!
(just illustrating the reality of the majority, science-shunning-except-when-improves-my-life crowd)
Thou shalt chill, not shill.
So what do we have to give up to have a zero change in the global temperature
Only one thing: having so many offspring.
The problem isn't that we have an excessive lifestyle. The problem is that there are TOO MANY of us having an excessive lifestyle. Get the population down to a billion or so and we can all have diesels, coal-fired power stations and as much beef as we could ever desire.
It's just that all 7 billion of us can't all do that at once.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
And yet the climate change deniers will CLING to that 1% and continue to stick their ignorant heads in the sand and pretend that we aren't messing up our climate.
Yeah, but EarthGP was ruined by Honda completely recently.
You are silly, we only have accurate temperature reconds for anything that could be considered a useable "grid" covering the earth for far less than a century.
Ah yes, because earning less then they could with the same degree out in private industry is such a gravy train....
The confidence levels in the data are 99%, not in the conclusion.
PS - I believe in man driven global warming, I just hate sensationalized headlines.
You don't know how stats work.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
If you want to find the modern culprits of greenhouse gases, look to India and China, not the US. We've cut our emissions drastically over the past 20 years.
I don't get it, after reading the comments here, why is there so much resistance accept that man is causing climate change? Just thinking logically, it makes sense. We're taking carbon that's been buried for millions of years, and then burning it, on a huge scale. How can this not affect the climate? I actually hope that the climate skeptics are right.
will include the true value. Do not transpose the conditional. Also, he is only "disproving" whatever model of natural variability he is using. If this turns out to be a strawman like most then this was a waste of time.
Temperature goes up more or less linearly, and CO2 goes up more or less linearly. Thus they are well-correlated. There's not a lot of power to that correlation, as the article demonstrates itself by trying it with different lags (from 0 to 20 years -- would have been interesting if he'd tried negative lags); the data is too featureless to show anything interesting.
Ask for a standard deviation of the annual temperature that gets posted here often, and you get no or derisive replies.
Plus, the "climate change" is arguing the rate of change. If that rate were the same as it was 500 years ago, no one would give a rip. The "climate change " would be too slow for you or me to worry about, everyone would be use to the slow changes and would have adjusted. But "we" must do "something" NOW, which bothers us.
You mean accurate temperature records up to 1987, before they shut off the majority of the weather stations (83% and growing) and started to rely on atmospheric satellite data that has lower accuracy rates spread over much larger areas?
And the remaining weather stations turned out to not be very reliable either, with most being more than 2 degrees Celsius error.
http://www.surfacestations.org...
Yep. Garbage in, garbage out. Models are like maps, they are not the territory. Since these "scientists" want me to ignore their 4.5 billion years of climate change and accept their area of focus that would not even qualify as a sliver of that time frame. They are just promoting pseudo-science. I to can smell a scam.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
/. was a great place to witness the flame wars between M$ and the Linux community. And where a geek could go to get help or insight to a technical problem. Now it's becoming another version of MSNBC.... Miss the old days.
Could not have said it better.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Enlighten me.
How does a 500 year data set apply to a 4.5 billion year old planet?
What postulate of statistics allows asserting accurate predictions from 0.0000001 repeating percent of the full data set?
Think about it. Could you predict the sentiments of every human on the planet (over 4 billion) by asking the last 500 people born?
Nope.
Nissan Leaf, Tesla Model S, Ford Focus Electric, Chevy Spark or any other decent BEV with that supplies reasonable range for most North Americans or Western Europeans.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
It's become a political litmus test. Just look at the names attributed to anyone who doesn't agree with you: denier, alarmist.
There's no room for real science.
I've never understood the controversy...does anyone think that pollution isn't harmful?
Our modern industrial society makes by-products of type and/or scale that **hurt nature**
No one, absolutely no one, even the climate change "deniers" can contradict this fact.
It's about government regulation...that's the only thing that keeps companies from unscrupulously disposing of their waste.
Companies do not want regulation...that pretty much explains the entire "climate debate"
Thank you Dave Raggett
Yea, look at this ice core data. Much warmer in the past, with no anthropogenic CO2 influence.
http://i.snag.gy/BztF1.jpg
Certainly no catastrophic AGW, humans do well in warm times.
Cold is cop failures, starvation, and freezing to death.
Shockingly, and unsurprisingly, by limiting themselves to the last 500 years, such pesky issues as the Medieval Warm Period go away. So all this tells me is that they can't even explain that. At least other climate scientists recognize the issues they have with the MWP, rather than just waving their hands to make it go away.
Folks, there is no doubt that man causes some degree of global warming. It may even be significant.
But putting forward a very questionable "study" with little practical "science" and having almost nothing that can be repeated or validated does not help the cause of proving global warming. It harms it! With each one of these "studies" it makes me wonder why there isn't some expert who has proven the thesis, with so many interested "scientists".
These news stories might be adequate for the masses, but definitely not for me, thanks.
Which Earth2, though? There have been several, and ALL had at least one hot chick and one guy who looks like Major West from Lost In Space (either of them).
Isn't that a more accurate term?
You're exactly right, but how do you get from here to there? If current demographic trends hold, we are drop down to a reasonable carrying capacity in 2100 or so.
Or next week, depending on the scenario.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
In ***unnatural*** concentrations anything is a pollutant.
Scale is key. Nuclear waste is pollution b/c of its radioactivity (found in nature)...CO2 is pollution b/c of the **scale** it is being unnaturally produced
All pollution is harmful b/c it *distrupts nature's perfect system*
Pollution disrupts in many ways.
Thank you Dave Raggett
500 years is not enough time to properly determine how climates develop, but 10 years is?
Additionally, the effect of CO2 on the climate is cumulative, and climate changes slowly. The last ten years of emissions pales in comparison to the stretch of time from now back to the start of the industrial revolution.
Enlighten me.
How does a 500 year data set apply to a 4.5 billion year old planet?
What has led you to this bizarre conclusion that the percentage of the planet's existence is significant?
What postulate of statistics allows asserting accurate predictions from 0.0000001 repeating percent of the full data set?
What "postulate" do you imagine says you can't? I haven't heard but a small fraction of all music ever created. But I can still name a Beatles song in a few notes. The size of "everything" is not relevant to the question.
Could you predict the sentiments of every human on the planet (over 4 billion) by asking the last 500 people born?
Polling is indeed the way that we find out the opinions of people in general. And 500 is indeed a reasonable poll, depending on the question.
But the equivalent to "500 people", would be 500 temperature measurements taken at one point on the earths surface. There is vastly more climate data than that that we have over the last 500 years.
I'm certainly not suggesting that we wait until we have 5 sigma confidence in the measurement before acting, but just pointing out that a commonly stated criterion for a particle physics "discovery" is 5 sigma or 99.99994 percent confidence.
How is global warming a political sham? Politicians can somehow just wave their arms and move their mouths and suddenly the world heats up? I don't see politicians as having that kind of superpower. Or, do you instead believe in a giant conspiracy between all climate scientists and the politicians?
Population trends show a rise to about 9 billion in 50 years time, with global population flatlining at that for the foreseeable future. Which is good news and bad news. Good news is that population isn't growing without end. Bad news is we need to plan for 9 billion when making AGW mitigation plans.
The existing and future dominance of Asia in creating and increasing atmospheric pollutants will doom the chances of colleges here in the West from affecting the global effect of Asia's pollution.
But good luck scaring the kids! It might even last for a few hours until they figure out we've dumped a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere for the past decade with almost no upswing in temperature. Once you realize that, you start caring about real pollution again instead of hating on poor old carbon so much.
The people denying man made climate change are also the same dickholes that refuse to enact or properly enforce job-killing regulations on "real pollution".
Look at the recent shit show in North Carolina with Duke Energy and the Republican Governor as a prime example.
Or those idiots in Texas who can't be bothered to inspect massive stockpiles of fertilizer that blow up towns.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Where I live (Illinois) I can choose to pay slightly more for my power generation dollars to go to renewable generators. I dug a little deeper and verified that it comes mostly from wind and some solar. I also think its a misconception that electric cars put a tremendous load on the grid. Unlike our central air conditioning in the summer, we hardly noticed an increase in our electric bill after we got our Tesla.
Greed is the root of all evil.
actually, no, I'd agree we have enough data about 1920 till now to talk about average global temperature within a couple tenths of a degree C over 95 years. but that's all. And I do agree carbon pollution is bad for a number of reasons even if climate not affected as much as the agenda-driven IPCC and the big investors influencing their actions would like us to believe
February 2014 was the 21st warmest February on record since 1880. The temperature was yet again above the 20th century average, for the 348th consecutive month. That is every month above the 20th century average for the last 29 years. Please, tell me just how you determined the temperature is going down?
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
On the other hand the media consultants employed by the billionaire owners of coal, oil, petroleum companies and investments in forestry products have absolutely no conflict of interest and they speak the original unvarnished truth.
I mean, who would you trust? Some one who is smart enough to make millions of dollars working for billionaires? Or the fools who spend so much of time studying and ending up working for a pittance? If these so called scientists are so smart why aren't they billionaires and millionaires? Shows who is smart and who you should listen to.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
>If they found that there was no man-made global warming, they'd be out of jobs.
You are showing complete ignorance of the scientific funding situation as well as academia.
Tenure track positions don't disappear if they don't get certain results. And there is a multitude of other climate topics that are important and need scientists working on.
And of course, this wasn't done by people with a vested interest in a positive conclusion, it was done by physicists. Statisticians with no vested interest have also found the same results.
You are just createing a false narrative that allows you to ignore facts you do not like.
If you can afford a Tesla, I'm not surprised you didn't notice the increase in your bill. Don't forget to thank the rest of us for the tax subsidy on your Tesla.
I said:
"In ***unnatural*** concentrations anything is a pollutant."
You can't counter that.
ex: Salt.
Sodium Chloride...its food for crying out loud! Everyone has it in their homes! We give it to babies! How can it be pollution??? WTF?
Dump 1,000 of salt onto a field and it becomes fallow.
****THATS POLLUTION****
same with CO2
Thank you Dave Raggett
I beg to differ , man made or not people will still have to deal with it or unless you want us to die off?
jeez i'm trolling myself....i misread your post...holy crap...
sorry...you were agreeing with me and my previous comment will not make any sense
i need to just stop posting in this thread
Thank you Dave Raggett
Did 7 billion people have to live with those natural climate changes in the past? Did they have infrastructure investment that would be utterly destroyed given even slight variations in environmental conditions?
Do you seriously think your argument has any relevance for the AGW problems we're currently facing?
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
I wonder why this topic is so much discussed in the USA. In every other country climate change and the fact that we, humans, are causing it is accepted as a scientific fact. However, in the US, there is still a large fraction who doubt it or ignore it. And I am wondering why is that so?
90%, 95%, 98%, 99%... what's next, 99.9%? Deniers like to argue that it's not caused by human activities. Pure bullshit, but it isn't even relevant. There are some who think that whatever happens is good as long as man didn't cause it. Those are the ones that might be OK with climate change as long as we didn't cause it. Where does this end? Is it OK for most of Earth's multi-celled life to be destroyed by a celestial collision just because we didn't cause it? Regardless of the reason for it, reducing greenhouse gases will slow it, so that needs to be done immediately.
Anthropogenic warming isn't dangerous to the planet, it's dangerous to us. The timeline of the planet is irrelevant.
Yes, for an analogous meaning of "predict" as applies to the AGW scenario, ie. not predict precise emotions and behaviour at any given instant, but predict general trends with a certain probability distribution. What do you think psychology is all about? They conduct surveys and studies of small a percentage of the population to find correlations and establish general trends about humanity, like what makes people happy, angry, sad, how they respond to trauma, etc.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
We sacrificed other things so we could buy what was for us a swing for the fences dream car. Thank you everyone for the tax subsidy. And you are welcome for our support of the Tesla strategy to get the cost of electric cars low enough so that gas cars don't make sense.
Greed is the root of all evil.
No but there is conspiracy between politicians and corporations all the time. They enact a policy, then once they leave office they by complete coincidence get a job with the corporations which their policies favoured. Why is this any different? The UK had a couple of issues. Wind farms are subsidised as are solar panels, subbed so heavily that you can use a diesel generator to shine lines on solar panels and still make a profit. Many MPs in the UK happened to own large amounts of shares in such companies. Guess where the money for this comes from? a tax on energy bills. I forget the name of the author but around 2002 was a Climate change report, it was badly written as it massively overstated the benefits of switching to renewables and cutting carbon, while massively underestimating the costs. He was slammed for constantly changing the variables in his report. Hell there was a bloke on the UK IPPC panel Dr Pachauri, he was extremely alarmist, and just by complete coincidence owned a company which was to receive 15m a year funding from the government.
Think about it. Could you predict the sentiments of every human on the planet (over 4 billion) by asking the last 500 people born?
There are charts that you can use to look up the proper sample size for whatever population and confidence interval you want.
http://www.research-advisors.com/tools/SampleSize.htm
Generally, you over sample in order to account for geographic areas, sub-groups, age/gender/etc.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I hear mother nature has been secretly receiving yellowcake shipments. Proof enough?
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
My solution in the same spirit: shoot everyone that doesn't believe in AGW. They don't have to pay taxes if they're dead.
says the morbidly obese person stuffing yet another cheeseburger into his mouth.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Try wind, but you probably won't have a bird left alive in the whole country.
It's a myth. The occasional bird is killed by a wind turbine, but as a cause of death it shrinks into irrelevance compared with other man-caused bird deaths - chief amongst them windows. Far more birds die from flying into windows than wind turbines.
PV gets cheaper every year, and is already very much the cheapest way to power an EV.
There's nothing wrong with nuclear. Built more plants.
And you haven't even considered the potential of the enormous power available in the oceans, both tide and wave.
Certainly the last thing we should be doing is drilling for more fossil fuels. Especially by fracking.
OK, my premise here i basically you're an idiot. I wouldn't usually dive right into the ad-hom, but these points have been so well covered in the past that the only excuse you have is stupidity (or willful ignorance which is basically stupidity). My some other people have modded your turd of a post "informative" of all things.
500 years isn't even enough time to properly determine how cities develop, never mind the climate.
Equating cities and climate. That's a weird analogy. Never mind though, reasoning by analogy is a useless, dark-ages methodology. It's not valid.
Also, you guys are behind the times on the whole manmade climate change thing. It's irrelevant if the climate is changing as a function of what mankind is doing,
Um no. Science is the study of natural phenomena. If it's a natural phenomena then it's relevant to science.
because we aren't making enough of a change to be a problem.
Yes we are. We're putting out more CO2 than all natural sources.
Any changes under way are a blip compared to the natural climate ranges that have existed in the past
Um so? That doesn't mean a change isn't happeneing. Just because there were change so big in the past that almost nothing survived doen't mean that (a) change isn't happening now and (b) it's not going to cause problems. Sure humans will survive (the changes won't be that big) but it doesn't mean it's going to e much fun.
, and not even close to any degrees of change that will require substantial effort to adapt to.
Not now, no. However, when the sea levels rise and they will, many of the world's cities will be wiped out what with being under 20m of water. That I dare say will require some degree of adaptation from their residents.
It might even last for a few hours until they figure out we've dumped a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere for the past decade with almost no upswing in temperature.
You are determinedly ignorant of the actual facts.
Living in your private world of rainbows, unicorns and pretty shiny sparkly faries must be nice.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It was a 7 degree rise for ages:
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matte...
Now that's the high end of the "prediction".
In 2010 NASA said this:
"8th December 2010 13:24 GMT - A group of top NASA and NOAA scientists say that current climate models predicting global warming are far too gloomy, and have failed to properly account for an important cooling factor which will come into play as CO2 levels rise."
And "New NASA model: Doubled CO2 means just 1.64C warming
'Important to get these things right', says scientist"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
In 2011 it was "Discovered" trees eat CO2:
Originally found at: http://www.google.com/hostedne...
Forests soak up third of fossil fuel emissions: study
By Marlowe Hood (AFP) – 5 days ago
PARIS — Forests play a larger role in Earth's climate system than previously suspected for both the risks from deforestation and the potential gains from regrowth, a benchmark study released Thursday has shown.
The study, published in Science, provides the most accurate measure so far of the amount of greenhouse gases absorbed from the atmosphere by tropical, temperate and boreal forests, researchers said.
"This is the first complete and global evidence of the overwhelming role of forests in removing anthropogenic carbon dioxide," said co-author Josep Canadell, a scientist at CSIRO, Australia's national climate research centre in Canberra.
"If you were to stop deforestation tomorrow, the world's established and regrowing forests would remove half of fossil fuel emissions," he told AFP, describing the findings as both "incredible" and "unexpected".
Also odd how this guy in 2007 was able to predict this winter's 100-year record breaking cold from things the IPCC have nothing to do with climate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Do the alarmists have an explanation for these?
Need Mercedes parts ?
People have made up their minds unfortunately. Changes in climate can easily be brushed off as natural variation. A few days of locally cold weather is enough to re-enforce a denier's belief that global warming is a farce.
Over time the consequences will become increasingly hard to ignore and people will suffer. As is typical, the poor will suffer the worse. Ironically, many otherwise conservative organizations such as insurance companies will be willing accept global warming as fact because it gives them an excuse to raise their rates in coastal areas.
If global warming means more girls in bikinis then I'm all for it. Seriously, what is wrong with warming up the earth a few degrees? What is wrong with milder winters? No one ever explains this, what is so wrong about global warming?
No it doen't. " For the industrial era, Lovejoy's analysis uses carbon-dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels as a proxy for all man-made climate influences – a simplification justified by the tight relationship between global economic activity and the emission of greenhouse gases and particulate pollution, he says. ... " That's what we call circular reasoning. Your argument is literally invalid for tripping over the common-to-"scientists"-lately fallacy of using the conclusion for the premise.
Cranky educator.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Great, so either you want to steal their money or kill them. Sure appears to be classic thug politics.
Bird deaths are no myth:
http://www.cfact.org/2013/03/1...
and keep in mind that wind power is a very small portion of the power produced in the country now. Ramp it up to produce 100%, and you're going to have nowhere where you wont be able to see a turbine, and nowhere a bird can fly and expect to live a normal lifetime.
Drilling absolutely should be done for both sustainability and geopolitical reasons. We cannot convert the entire vehicular complement of transportation in this country to electricity for decades, and possibly never if the magic battery is not invented. Still no one knows how to build it. When they do, then we can get on with battery powered cars that can perform like internal combustion engined cars, and semi-trucks and boats / ships too. This may never happen.
And, BTW, fracking has been around since the 40's. Whats you're problem? Are you one of those enviros that opposes everything?
What we have to do is to keep costs down as long as possible, and that means petroleum. Only with the prosperity brought to us by petroleum will we have the research money to possibly perfect something that actually works, be it wind, solar, geothermal, whatever.
And we still have to research geo-engineering because the damn commies in China are NOT going to quit digging coal, ever. We either figure out a way to take the CO2 out of the air in order to reduce its concentration, or figure out how to live with a warmer planet. Maybe put some $$$ behind getting this working:
http://phys.org/news199005915....
It strikes me that 500 years, practically the blink of an eye, might not be quite sufficient to determine trends on geological scales...
You're making mistakes with statistics. It doesn't matter if the period under study is small relative to cosmological phenomena. What matters is the length of time in which the temperature increase occurred (30 years) relative to the total study period (500 years), and the rarity of the phenomenon observed within the total study period. That is what you'd need to calculate whether this change is a random fluctuation. The temperature variation across billions of years does not matter here.
In fact, even one year would be enough to detect some anomalies. Say your computer had 10 crashes inside of 30 minutes, and zero crashes in the prior year. Would you suspect a problem, other than just normal occasional crashes? Would it matter if your period of observation (one year) is small relative to the history of computing? Again, what matters is the length of the period in which the change occurred (0.00006 years, or 30 minutes) relative to the length of the total study period (1 year, or 17000x as much), and how rare the phenomenon was in the total study period. It's just not necessary to know the history of computing in order to calculate the odds.
You can repeat this procedure indefinitely. In some cases, even one millisecond would be enough to detect an anomaly, if we were studying phenomena which occur over femtoseconds (one quadrillionth of a millisecond). Suppose some event happens every microsecond on average, over a period of one millisecond. What are the chances it will occur in the next femtosecond? About 1 in 1,000,000,000, and the age of the earth does not matter.
This doesn't matter as long as the errors are randomly distributed. There is a big difference between the error of one station, and the error of all stations put together. This is because it's extremely unlikely that all random errors will point in the same direction. As a result, you can get an extremely accurate measurement of temperature even if individual sensors are inaccurate, provided you have enough of them and the errors are randomly distributed.
Also, many errors can be corrected. Satellite measurements show gradually changing levels of radiation from earth because their orbit is gradually decaying, and it's possible to correct for that.
This brought to you by the stereotype-and-kneejerk department.
What postulate of statistics allows asserting accurate predictions from 0.0000001 repeating percent of the full data set?
It's the postulate of denialism, basically, which involves burying the ovbious flaws in his argument under as much mathematical mumbo-jumo as possible. That prevents enyone with out a sufficiently mathematical background as calling it out as crap.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Then figure out how you're going to generate all that while remaining carbon free. Try wind, but you probably won't have a bird left alive in the whole country.
Wind doesn't kill that many birds. I've been to multiple wind farms in multiple countries and have not seen piles of dead birds at the foot of the turbines. It just doesn't happen. It may have happened for some wind farm placed in a migration path, but it doesn't happen in the manner currently asserted by the green-haters.
Solar? How long will it take to ramp that up, and at what cost?
The longer we wait, the longer it will take. So we should start sooner rather than later. Distributed PV is the best solution, with night storage via hydro, kinetic, thermal or chemical batteries (probably in that order).
keep researching geothermal...
Ah, the guy that wants his pet theory to be the only one. It's been researched. It's only viable for areas with active surface thermal (Iceland, and areas with hot springs). It will *never* be viable in arbitrary areas. That's why there isn't that much research into it. You want to see your $300 electric bill got to $3000 and still have rolling blackouts? Try geothermal.
Learn to love Alaska
Its f'n 20 miles to town and I'm 66 years old. Even if I could bike it, I don't have time for that, and would get killed by a drunk within 3 years on the roads around here coming back from my poker games at 1 AM. Bike,. my ass. That won't even solve the problem, either. You need petroleum to grow your food, or if not yours, for the teeming masses in the big cities, you need petroleum to transport it, you need petroleum to heat your homes, and so forth.
Statistics allows this. It depends upon how frequently the event occurs.
Suppose that among the last 500 people born, none of them are albinos. What are the chances that the 501st person born will be an albino? It's possible to know that it's unlikely, using a dataset of only 500 people. A dataset of 5,000 people (selected at random) would be more than enough, even though the population is 7 billion.
Bear in mind that temperatures of the last 20 years have been way outside anything of the last 500. Using your birth rate analogy, suppose nobody among the last 500 people born are albinos, and then suddenly, the next 20 born are all albinos. Wouldn't you suspect something?
Where the H did that come from? There's other things to tax, don'tcha know? We didn't even have income taxes 'til 1913 and were getting along just fine until Democrats insisted on being able to steal people's money directly. We even had the golden age of the 1880's, which was our greatest economic expansion of our entire history. Its no coincidence that there was no income tax at the time.
"Tell that to the shills working for the fossil fuel industry! Or the Koch brothers would hire them."
Oh, I love this discussion! Here we have those who say the fossil fuel companies don't care about global warming, claiming that these same companies would hire those doing climate studies to discover the truth about global warming. You can't have it both ways. How many studies have you seen coming from Exxon-Mobile that concern climate change? (Hint: Zero.) There's no opportunity for these scientists outside of academia, and academia is in large part supported by grants from "those who care".
What other "important" climate topics are we talking about? The direction and speed of the winds over the Himalayas? The prevailing ocean currents around Antarctica? Oh, now there you have some interesting topics. (Not.)
These people have a vested interest in being experts that will be called upon (and paid) to do conferences, books, sit on boards, etc. It is you who is ignorant of academia, my friend.
You have to hit him in his beak then go inside and kill him, but remember it will result in the revenge of the Reptites at some point.
Ha ha ha! Your reference to this "being no myth" is a site that is guest hosting Ann Coulter, and calls Global Warming a myth! Thanks for demonstrating my point so well. The bird killing aspect of wind turbines is just a myth made up by the same anti-science people that deny global warming.
And, BTW, fracking has been around since the 40's. Whats you're problem? Are you one of those enviros that opposes everything?
I would have thought the fact that I said build nuclear would have answered that for you. And I don't care whether fracking has been around since the 1840s, it's an environmental blight and a serious health problem.
the damn commies in China
You're a fucking imbecile. No wonder you linked to a Ann Coulter supporting site.
No, it is NOT true that the longer we wait, the more expensive it will be to ramp up solar. It is exactly the opposite.
Wind has an extremely small penetration in the electrical generation market right now. If you ramp it up to 100% or more to account for windless days, there's nowhere you're not going to be able to see one (do you WANT a landscape like that?) and there will be billions of dead birds.
You say we can't drill arbitrary places to find geothermal, and that may eventually prove to be true, but don't you think we ought to be trying? Such a thing, if perfected, will last longer than the sun itself.
I kinda like solar-thermal, but try to make it work in the midwest where normal == overcast. Same problem for PV.
Electric cars won't use fossil fuel once we go nuclear.
deny anthropomorphic climate change/global warming on the basis of not trusting data representing past temperatures (tree rings, lake sediments, etc.) put absolute trust in a book written 2k years ago to be the word of God himself.
this is simply not enough time to base this assumption!
We can only power about 10% of the US with wind before we are disrupting the jet stream. Small amount of wind power is good, sure. But it is fated to be a small portion.
Why do we let the deniers control the conversation? We need to ignore them and figure out what we need to do about global warming. Should we turn off half the streetlights? All the streetlights? Or would we rather go without air conditioning? How will a "free" society that has optimized itself for blind consumerism re-optimize itself for intelligent consumption? Can it even hope to do such a thing? Or do we all agree that there is nothing that can be done collectively?
When I worked for PG&E I saw the sulfur emission at the geothermal plant in Norcal. The entire plant, and road, and the field out to the main road was yellow. This is a problem.
Girls, girls. Settle down. You're both pretty.
Bark less. Wag more.
Scientists not 100% certain that climate change isn't natural.
Stealing and threating is politics. It's the source and maintenance of all nationstates and all official regions thereof. Are you claiming all governments currently in existence are illegitimate?
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
In the past 20 years, has a higher correlation between temperature predictions that our best weather models.
None of the predictions in the past 15 years has come true, including Al Gore's famous "Snow will be a thing of the past by 2012."
I also do not trust the IPCC because they are a major backer of carbon exchanges, which has nothing to do with science.
The carbon exchanges if you do not know that they are, will tax every nation based on how much CO2 they use. This money which will measure in the 10's of trillions of dollars per year, will then be used to create a Global Army to enforce the C02 emissions/taxes as well as a new Elite class.
This new Elite class will not be electable, and not answerable to anyone. Sort of like how the idiot Europeans run their EU Union and have the GAUL to dictate to Putin what democracy is and how the Ukraine should be governed.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
You'd have to assume you already know most everything about the population, and that's it's grossly homogeneous. They precisely don't know what they'd have to know to here to make the assumptions they're making, and they're ignoring other sources of contrary data though that's par for them.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
RTFA. They're physicists, not climate scientists. Wah wah wah...
It has been getting warmer, and human carbon emissions have probably contributed to that.
Having said that, the paper itself doesn't show that. It gives a 99% confidence under a shitload of assumptions, many of which are picked out of thin air. So the confidence in its result is much lower.
None of this gets to the heart of the matter, though: even if it has been getting warmer and even if humans are responsible for it (statements I both believe to be true), that tells us nothing about the future or what policies we should adopt.
..."examine historical temperature data going back 500 years"
Because "climate cycles" are never more than 500 years long? Seriously?
-Styopa
"A study out of McGill University sought to examine historical temperature data going back 500 years..."
In other words, "We looked at the last 2 seconds of this 9 hour VHS quality movie and determined that the car featured in it is moving faster than it should be in last frame."
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
The American economy grew by more than 400% from 1865 - 1900:
http://www.shmoop.com/gilded-a...
Clinton do that? Factor for his 8 years vs that 35, that's about 4 to 1, so Clinton would have had to grow the economy by 100%. Didn't happen.
So....what's that big scary number when you express it as a percentage of total bat deaths?
No sig today...
Bird deaths are no myth:
http://www.cfact.org/2013/03/1...
Nobody's saying it is.
But how does it stack up when compared to other bird killers (like glass windows, cars, etc)?
No sig today...
I don't get it, after reading the comments here, why is there so much resistance accept that man is causing [changes in the Earth's rotation speed]? Just thinking logically, it makes sense. We're taking carbon that's been buried for millions of years, and then burning it, on a huge scale. How can this not affect the [Earth's rotation speed]?.
That's not really an argument. Something is either happening or it's not, regardless of whether it sounds logical to you or anyone else.
People are skeptical because the climate change alarmists want to centralize government power over individuals. There's a never-ending list of reasons why we are told we should give governments more power over us. When one reason fails, the power-hungry always come up with a new reason. There's an equally long set of historical examples for why government power over individuals is dangerous.
Since power-hungry people have an obvious motive to lie, and since free people have obvious reasons to be suspicious of the power-hungry, why shouldn't you expect "resistance" when yet another reason to concentrate power is offered?
So he wants to determine whether or not the temperature increases since 1880 are part of the normal fluctuations in climate and he only goes back to 1500 for data to analyze? As part of normal fluctuation in earths' climate, Manhattan Island and New England were underneath a glacier (the Wisconsin Ice Sheet). At another point in earths history, tropical plants grew inside the arctic circle. Again, all part of the normal fluctuation of earths' climate. I was very disappointed in this study because this is question I would like to have answered. We have seen periods in earths' past where the concentration of carbon dioxide increased rapidly and then reversed itself. I mean really reversed itself; all the way to an ice age. What is the mechanism for the reversal? Some have suggested the increase in CO2 caused more plant growth which soaked up the extra CO2. OK, but why didn't the CO2 level stabilize? Why was the decrease so dramatic? Is it possible earths' climate is fundamentally a chaotic system?
Academia is business as well, therefore....
You say we can't drill arbitrary places to find geothermal, and that may eventually prove to be true, but don't you think we ought to be trying? Such a thing, if perfected, will last longer than the sun itself.
And is roughly as safe as fracking. Pumping stuff into the ground to get something else out sounds familiar, even if it's just water in and heat out.
Wind has an extremely small penetration in the electrical generation market right now. If you ramp it up to 100% or more to account for windless days, there's nowhere you're not going to be able to see one (do you WANT a landscape like that?) and there will be billions of dead birds.
Nah, there won't be that many dead birds. Wind is still much better than geothermal everywhere. The forced earthquakes and such it causes.
The problem with green power is it's best to have multiple ones. Wind works at night, and solar works on windless days. Having some storage to even out the generation differences would make all the difference. With storage in place, PV is much better than solar thermal, and wind is a better "top-up" for the batteries, though many areas reliably use it for base generation, as it can be a constant power source, but is area dependent, like geothermal.
Learn to love Alaska
Bird deaths are no myth:
http://www.cfact.org/2013/03/1...
CFACT is not a remotely reliable source, nor to they cite any such source. Google Scholar is usually good at finding real research papers on the topic. This is the top hit for 2013, and while it finds some bird mortality due to wind turbines, it estimates the effect to be much lower than that of other anthropogenic risks for birds, even assuming a 10-fold increase in wind turbines.
There is no silver bullet, nor will we ever manage to return the planet to Garden of Eden conditions. But "there is no single perfect solution, therefore let's not do anything" is not a viable approach to life. Perfect solutions to any problem are exceedingly rare, but that does not stop us from improving situations.
Stephan
How does a 500 year data set apply to a 4.5 billion year old planet?
Extremely well, as it turns out. You don't need weather records going back to the dinosaurs to forecast tomorrow's weather. It would simply be irrelevant. All you need is enough information to establish a valid model for NOW and then use it's predictive powers. The climate people have all of that and they've run the numbers. Guess what? It works.
So what if the model only holds for a few decades, that's long enough to forecast some rather disturbing possibiliites. Ones that may (or may not - but that's a different issue) need some people, somewhere to do something
The scientists have done the science bit. It's now a political game to actually get people to do something. Questioning the science at this stage is a bt like questioning the properties of gravity - just because it may have been different 10 billion years ago.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Actually, that was the Gilded age: something gilded appears golden but is actually not so.
Haha, you think that people haven't looked Milankovitch cycles? How you hear about it in the first place? Magick?
Nothing will convince you MatthiasF. You will either die quite soon ('cause most deniers are old), or one day be explaining to your kids how the climate changes were natural, and that's why you fought against sensible measures to do something about it. Good luck with that.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
You mean accurate temperature records up to 1987,
Be honest with yourself. You learnt everything you know about AGW from reading specific blogs, and watching youtube and TV.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
What do you mean "once we go nuclear"?
We went nuclear in the '80s.
Oh, you don't live in France, so sorry.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Off-topic: the 16th Amendment didn't change anything. It's a distraction from the fact that judges have been ignoring the letter of the law for decades. Look at the grammar and compare it to the laws that came before. Then ask yourself what was repealed. The answer is nothing was repealed. People say it applies to personal income taxes, but there are no words in there that could possibly refer to a person. The 16th Amendment is a restatement of the existing laws in an intentionally confusing fashion. Add in public schools telling kids what to think and you slowly get a society that accepts things just because everybody else says so.
It's irrelevant if the climate is changing as a function of what mankind is doing, in whole or in part - because we aren't making enough of a change to be a problem.
Internally inconsistent argument.
And, fyi, people have studied that function extensively (perhaps more than anything else ever), and determined that the function is indeed strong enough to make a change that is very likely a problem.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Those of us who ACTUALLY care about the environment saw Global Warming as the political sham it always was, funneling money into lining the pockets of many politically connected people and industries.
Projection.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
There is a significant population of young self-styled geniuses, who think they know more about everything then long beards who've been around the block, and actually do science, and have publications. They believe this because they know what the malloc(...) function does, which makes them special.
This issues has been deliberately politicized by the right. (Don't for get that it was Bush senior who signed the Kyoto protocol.) Somehow the opinion shapers manage to make these young geniuses feel like rebels, instead of the sheep that they are. (Frank Luntz, I'm talking about you.)
This issue isn't going away, and neither is the spin-doctoring. In 20 or 40 years, I these young geniuses will be telling their children how smart they were and continue to be. Hardly anyone has that moment when they realize that everything they *know* is wrong.
There's a book "Mistakes were made: but not by me", written by two prominent social psychologists. It details (among other things) the truly odious history of clinical psychologists injecting false memories of childhood abuse into their clients. The most heart breaking thing, other than the broken families, is that even after all of the empirical research into the topic, demonstrating what has happened, most of these psychologists are sticking to their guns, blithly ruining more lives. It's all very moral from their point of view.
That is the level of madness we have to contend with. Otherwise dealing with AGW would be painless, simple, and almost invisible in the changes that would happen to our lives.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
"Lloyd Christmas: What do you think the chances are of a guy like you and a girl like me... ending up together?
Mary Swanson: Well, Lloyd, that's difficult to say. I mean, we don't really...
Lloyd Christmas: Hit me with it! Just give it to me straight! I came a long way just to see you, Mary. The least you can do is level with me. What are my chances?
Mary Swanson: Not good.
Lloyd Christmas: You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?
Mary Swanson: I'd say more like one out of a million.
[pause]
Lloyd Christmas: So you're telling me there's a chance... YEAH!"
-- Dumb and Dumber, 1994
Oh, really, AC? Well, where on that page you reference does it say how many studies are being funded by Koch Industries. (Again, zero.) At best it suggests that Koch industries is hiring marketers and supporting politicians, not scientists. (Oh, and it didn't escape me that this page is on the Greenpeace website, well known for its biased views in "saving the planet".)
There must be some truth to my "complete bullshit", AC, or your response would have included something more than abuse and biased marketing fluff.
Even in the face of your reply, my premise still holds that the authors of this study have a vested interest that biases them toward the result that you prefer.
They could have thought about a study like this when they first started thinking about the green house effect and climate change:
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/121...
But no, temperature recordings normally start mid 19th century, that is tardy. Now if they had actually started doing something against climate change around 1950
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~ep...
that would have been wise, alas ...
Je me souviens.
Precisely. No matter what alternative energy you come up with, as soon as it threatens to become practical to use it at scale, the environmentalists will find a problem with it and shut it down. Fuck em, just burn lignite.
The study infers what the temperature was from "a variety of gauges found in nature, such as tree rings, ice cores, and lake sediments. And the fluctuation-analysis techniques make it possible to understand the temperature variations over wide ranges of time scales."
In other words, the author relies upon a strong (perhaps even one-to-one given his 99% certainty claim) relationship between the average seasonal temperature from the thickness of a tree ring, or a layer in some ice or lake sediments. Now I may be a bit ignorant on the subject, but I do believe that we'd be talking about trees that are 500 years old, which only grow in certain places (such as Sequoia trees on the Pacific coast). Ice cores 500 years old must be either far north or in Antarctica. Lake sediments will accumulate only where there is a basin fed by significant rainfall. So, this author's sampling is from a few distinct locations around the world.
Now the thicknesses of these metrics does not prove temperature, it suggests the amount of precipitation. Trees grow better where there is rain, and ice and sediments accumulate more when precipitation increases. Show me the proof that an increase in temperature in these locations increases precipitation, and I might begin to believe this author. (I imagine that will be difficult to do, because there was no one around 500 years ago taking temperature readings at the locations of these metrics.)
(Oh, and for you global warming nuts out there: please forgive me for examining this intellectually.)
Be honest with yourself. You learnt everything you know about AGW from reading specific blogs, and watching youtube and TV.
Be honest with yourself. Most temperature records outside of cities don't exist before 1977, especially in countries like the US, Canada, Russia, Australia or Africa. Do you know why? Because there were no stations to record the information.
Om, nomnomnom...
we'd have to get developing titans like India and China
This gets bandied around a lot as a "reason" not to do anything, or to do very little, about reducing human impact on the environment (Not saying that this is your point, just picking the words out). It's crap for two reasons: first, the impact of the US on the global environment far outweighs India or China's impact, now or in the foreseeable future. Secondly, and more importantly, the argument effectively says "can't fix everything so there's no use even trying." It may be that you can't fix everything, but we have to start somewhere, and doing something is better than doing nothing.
Be honest with yourself. Most temperature records outside of cities don't exist before 1977, especially in countries like the US, Canada, Russia, Australia or Africa. Do you know why? Because there were no stations to record the information.
And that type of ad hoc analysis is supposed to substitude for disinterested scientific investigation? Is that the best you got? Remember when Richard Muller was *sure* that climate scientists were cooking the books on temps, and promised to bring the best science to the problem in BEST? He got funding at the drop of a hat (from Koch), and Anthony Watts /promised/ to abide by Muller's findings. Then Muller's findings disagreed with what Watts wanted, and Muller was a AGW "shill" over night. And you think you know more than Muller?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
So if I study the spectrogram of a star for an hour, I can't make valid predictions about what it'll do for the next few minutes, because it's been in existance for billions of years???
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
No single tech will replace petroleum - that's why we're pursuing more than one option.
And the less you spend on paying for gas, the more you have to buy electrons. Some sort of offset or special pricing will be needed for low-income folks who see their electric bills go up if power prices rise.
There's also still a lot that can be done for efficiency, even if you don't shift all the way to Passivhaus standards.
Wrong answer: keep drilling. I hope to live long enough that the only person being told to "drill, baby, drill" is Todd Palin.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
There are climate scientist, and most of them work on climate models. The physicists in TFA are working the same problem from a different angle: statistics (and coming to the same conclusions). They won't profit from more money being invested in climate models, though, falsifying the assumption on which the post I originally replied to was based. Not that such an obvious troll really needs falsifying.
Yeah, its as safe as fracking most likely, so its something we should be doing.
Dead birds are dead birds. Those big paddles in the sky are going to have an effect, and if there are LOTS of paddles in the sky, then there's going to be LOTS of dead birds. I really ain't that all broke up about it, EXCEPT if it does rid the skies of all the birds. Don't think it'll happen at any concentration of wind machines, having birds live normal length lives might be a thing of the past.
Yes, wind and solar. Solar thermal can work at night if the thermal part is used to heat something that stays hot all night. Wind is 24 hours as long as there's a good enough breeze. But these things are EXPENSIVE. If it was just a matter of all the well-to-do people just having to cough up some more so that they are not quite so well-to-do, it might fly. But there are something like 49 million people in poverty in the USA, and they cannot stand having their electric bills double. They need cheap to survive. Living in poverty is said to take about 6.5 years off your life, and if you do it as a kid, the 6.5 years are not recoverable with subsequent prosperity. We can't induce more poverty while chasing this idea.
Oh yeah? How do you make a car go down the road on nuclear electricity? You can't just use a long extension cord, you need a battery. So far, the battery tech is too expensive and too limited to replace all the internal combustion engined vehicles there are. You can get it to work for a price in a car like a Tesla, but your Ford F150 with an electric motor is probably going to have a 12 mile range with current battery tech.
It _adds_ to dead birds, rather than trading places with glass, cars, etc. How they compare will be determined by how far out we want to build wind. If we go 100% - 150% of our requirements, and account for the staggering increase in those requirements from not only powering the grid that exists, but adding to it electric vehicles to 100% convert the highways to electricity, there probably won't be a square inch of sky that you can photograph in the USA that doesn't have a wind generator occluding it.
Shoot the environmentalists. If we'd have listened to Shakespere, and shot all the lawyers, we'd also be better off now. This is like that.
No shit.
Yes, a single tech _will_ replace petroleum because it has to. Right now, there seems to be exactly two ways to convert potential energy into kenetic energy that can power a vehicle down a road and they are burning something or magnetism, as in electric motors. Electricity will be the single tech that replaces petroleum for everything except possibly flight at jet-power speeds. We don't know how to do that with magnetism yet, I think.
Offset for low income people? Where's that supposed to come from? You one of those guys that thinks the rich can provide all $$$ to run everything? Hint: They're not THAT rich:
http://townhall.com/columnists...
They just don't have enough money to lift us all out of our miseries.
The right answer is to keep drilling, only faster, and keep everyone living well so those of us that may be capable of finding an answer are not occupying all their time trying to figure out how to live on what's left after the gov't steals their money with some nonsense like a carbon tax.
You have to go back tens of thousands of years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
600,000 bats.... That's roughly one colony the size of the IH-35 McNeil overpass in Round Rock, Texas. Spread out over a whole year, and a lot more land mass than even the entire state of Texas.
"Offset for low income people? Where's that supposed to come from? You one of those guys that thinks the rich can provide all $$$ to run everything? Hint: They're not THAT rich:"
Call it a tax break, which rich people benefit from all the time.
A properly designed and er, well-regulated carbon tax can and will work - if gov't can keep the "makers" from cheating the system.
These latter years, it's seems to be very difficult to do.
Oil prices have been very high for years, despite America's domestic production being at its highest in a long time.
You're not going to drill your way out of the coming climate disaster but will merely have a bigger hole to bury yourself it.
If we find ways to stave it off, it'll be because of reduced usage of oil and other carbon-intensive fuels.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Once you install solar, your bills won't go up unless your usage does, so long as you put in a right-sized system. So, solar reduces poverty. Some places will install systems for "free".
Learn to love Alaska
This doesn't matter as long as the errors are randomly distributed.
This may not be true. That is, you are right that it doesn't matter, but the errors might not be randomly distributed. For example, one of the reasons the Berkeley earth study had trouble getting published was because they couldn't show how they accounted for heat islands.
Sometimes the biases can be tricky. Another example, a study of California's central valley showed that increasing irrigation has caused the temperature to rise across the region. That's a regional effect, but I'm not sure any of the temperature aggregations have taken that into account.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
" the big investors influencing their actions would like us to believe" - and those big investors would be? the Fossil Fuel industry?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
OK, now you try to explain how coal was formed and why we get ice ages. There were no humans back then. If you look at temperature evdence on a geological time scale, then mammals have a stabilizing influence on climate.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Let me try it again slowly.
It's been a 7F degree rise for ages.
Now it's a range of 1.5 to 4.5 (4.5F ~7C) degree change.
Has this gone up, or down? Looks like down to me.
NASA pointed out the prediction was too high and the current prediction has been attenuated somewhat.
If you check, since 1985, smarter people than you and I have been saying "but plants eat CO2, especially when they get warmer" and the alarmists have always said "no". Check for yourself.
Now they're describing the findings as both "incredible" and "unexpected" that this actually happens. These are the "experts" that know ALL about CO2. Suuuuuuuuure they do.
But wait. There's more. Recently Freeman Dyson said:
“I just think they don’t understand the climate,” he said of climatologists. “Their computer models are full of fudge factors.”
A major fudge factor concerns the role of clouds. The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide on its own is limited. To get to the apocalyptic predictions trumpeted by Al Gore and company, the models have to include assumptions that CO-2 will cause clouds to form in a way that produces more warming.
“The models are extremely oversimplified,” he said. “They don’t represent the clouds in detail at all. They simply use a fudge factor to represent the clouds.”
and
"Dyson said his skepticism about those computer models was borne out by recent reports of a study by Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading in Great Britain that showed global temperatures were flat between 2000 and 2010 — even though we humans poured record amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere during that decade."
Recently Lovelock said:
"Now Lovelock is walking back his rhetoric, admitting that he and other prominent global warming advocates were being alarmists. In a new interview with MSNBC he says: '"The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books — mine included — because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened," Lovelock said. "The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," he said. "The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that."
Last week the Daily Fail reported the AP had had the IPCC report leaked to it and reported:
"Scientists working on the most authoritative study on climate change were urged to cover up the fact that the world’s temperature hasn’t risen for the last 15 years, it is claimed.
A leaked copy of a United Nations report, compiled by hundreds of scientists, shows politicians in Belgium, Germany, Hungary and the United States raised concerns about the final draft.
Published next week, it is expected to address the fact that 1998 was the hottest year on record and world temperatures have not yet exceeded it, which scientists have so far struggled to explain."
"Germany called for the references to the slowdown in warming to be deleted, saying looking at a time span of just 10 or 15 years was ‘misleading’ and they should focus on decades or centuries.
Belgium objected to using 1998 as a starting year for statistics, as it was exceptionally warm and makes the graph look flat - and suggested using 1999 or 2000 instead to give a more upward-pointing curve."
"The United States delegation even weighed in, urging the authors of the report to explain away the lack of warming using the ‘leading hypothesis’ among scientists that the lower warming is down to more heat being absorbed by the ocean – which has got hotter.
The last IPCC ‘assessment report’ was published in 2007 and has been the subject of huge controversy after it had to correct the
Need Mercedes parts ?
Check the math. There's been no warming since 98. If you had facts on your side you wouldn't need to use rhetoric like "denier".
This is not the holocaust.
Also, this wasn't "a few days of bad weather" this was two years of awful winters, cold springs and 100 year record cold in some places because of five polar vortexes in a winter that a) began a month early and b) ened late and c) was predicted in 2007 by a method the IPCC claimed had nothing to do with it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Excuse me but you're on the wrong side of the prediction credibility gap here. And all the rhetoric in the world won't fix that. You may lie, but the numbers do not.
Need Mercedes parts ?
There are places that are having more extreme temperatures, he or she could be in one of them. Here in the UK, winters are warmer, rain fall has increased to create flooding, summer temperatures are getting more extreme so i guess there is the opposite happening somewhere. People tend to attribute "their" local experience as a whole world experience
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
don't forget the ozone layer hole slowly repairing
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
"97%+ of geologists agreed the continents were stable. It was Settled Science. Hundreds of research papers supported it. Overwhelming consensus. And wrong. And, oddly (not really, if you think about it a moment), it was not a geologist but a meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, who ultimately showed all the mutually agreeing geologists they had it all wrong; the continents move." - Dr. Michael K. Oliver
Need Mercedes parts ?
The climate in the UK has been slowly changing over the passed 15 or so years, the extremes are getting wider. I think once all the ice has melted in the polar regions and its no longer feeding cold water in to the seas to keep it relatively cool, the temperatures will rise quicker and more noticeably.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Having seen where we actually put stations for recording temperature data in Canada? Yes. In the shade, next to a cold water mountain stream, surrounded by pine trees, where it gets 1hr of sunlight per day. Or, right next to a major highway where it sees 50k+ vehicles per day. Seems to me like yes, I do. And I can keep going.
Om, nomnomnom...
I am not sure if you are aware of this, but in the rest of the world you can buy an extremely efficient diesel car. Hell, my Jag gets 40mpg!(US, not UK).
Some years ago we had a VW polo. That thing got 65 MPG and even had a diesel particulate filter so its emission level were very low.
In my opinion, a modern diesel is much, much cleaner over-all than a shitty Prius.
Exactly. The solution to both the western dependence on oil and the contribution our nations make towards greenhouse emissions is nuclear power with a fuel reprocessing cycle. Perfect? Not by a long shot, but it would certainly have given us some breathing space; time enough to get our cars off oil, invest in solar, geo, tidal and wind power.
However it didn't work out like that because the no-nuke greenies stepped on the neck of nuclear power, effectively stopping it cold. We're resourceful buggers so we did the next best thing and focused our efforts on technology to yield significant energy savings and developed alternative energy sources to keep society moving along.
Oh, wait - that's not what happened at all - silly me. Instead, life went on. Growth went on. We built coal and gas-fired power stations to keep up with demand. Who could have predicted that outcome? Certainly not the no-nuke greenies anyway; likely they were off somewhere else by this time, busily chirping at people for eating McDonalds or some such.
Now we're at 400ppm atmospheric CO2 with 2-3 degrees of warming as a likely entrée to a much, much bigger problem. If the warnings are right then we should say thanks to the no-nuke NIMBYs. In the short term you've kept us all on the oil tit unnecessarily, but I really hope you all enjoy your true place in history as the motherfuckers responsible for Humanity's collapse back to the iron age and the destruction of countless species in the process.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Just tried to fix your rant..
"Pollution is harmful. So you BASTARDS that have been trying to reduce CO2 to stop it becoming the dominant gas in the air (which can kill) have diverted vast funds of money that might have gone have gone into reducing real and meaningful pollution.
Many species have died and will die because of your idiocy.
Those of us who ACTUALLY care about the environment saw Anti Global Warming as the political sham it always was, funnelling money into lining the pockets of many politically connected people and fossil fuel industries. Those of us who care have seen the rusted nodding donkeys from decades past, and shake our heads as the cycle of meaningless and environmentally damaging forms of fossil fuel energy comes around for another pass..
But please, do go on posing as if you care what happens to the Earth while you promote support for things like fossil fuels."
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
i'm not surprised you are trolling as an AC, that was embarrassing.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Well, I just don't believe that abusing the American people, to prevent the relatively small amount of driving that isn't absolutely essential, in a country that has already reduced its carbon footprint more than any other, in the face of countries like China and India that don't really give a F, is going to be sufficient to solve this problem.
I believe the way to solve this problem is to keep prosperity as high as we can make it, research the problem scientifically and find a solution that the American public will buy. That solution would be something that solves the problem _and_ makes their lives better. That solution would be something like the STEP process I've been linking to, that would reduce the carbon in the atmosphere to pre-industrial revolution levels. That solution would be the electrification of transportation completely, bringing with it a dramatic reduction in the cost of transportation from everyone from the poor to the rich. Stuff like that. Building 1500 or more huge nuclear power plants and the invention of the magic battery to enable using it on the highway would have the American public kissing your feet.
But (further) crippling the economy with a carbon tax, and most likely precluding the research necessary to make these things happen I still believe to be counterproductive.
Hey, here's one thing we can do with a political solution that will improve the situation and be "bought" by the American people. Since the income taxes, and NOT "work-for-peanuts" foreign workforces is the real reason that jobs have gone and stay overseas, lets REPEAL the income taxes, get our jobs back from overseas and cross-border, build 100's of 1000's of factories that run on electricity that is produced by MUCH cleaner natural gas that will come from fracking the whole USA, and shut down those foreign factories that are running on coal. Now, THAT will have a positive effect on the carbon footprint of manufacturing world wide, as American industry does it better with cleaner energy, and incidentally results in full employment including those that never went to college. It doesn't take college to do pipefitting and welding and millwright things and electrician work or production line work or etc. in a factory. The economy would boom, we would have a positive effect on the CO2, and it wouldn't even require that those participating in the whole thing believe that they are doing something for global warming. They don't even have to believe in global warming, they can believe it is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated upon mankind, but will still cooperate because it is in their interest to do so, as would be the electrification of transportation.
These sorts of things will work because it would be good for everybody. A carbon tax won't work because it will further pauperize the American people and they will resist it, successfully, politically.
I don't think that's realistic. "Me" putting in solar is a possibility, but I'm already spending $25K - $30K next fall to install geothermal heating and cooling. Even I, as a retired Navy engineer, can't afford to do both, at least not right away. And, my electricity is so cheap anyway, being anywhere from $65 / month to $150 / month in the summer when the air conditioner runs won't save me much, I think. And the poor, including the working poor that we have millions of today, won't be able to afford it either.
Solar, if it ever works at all, is probably going to have to come from the electric company setting up large facilities.
But solar reducing poverty? I just don't see it in either mode, privately owned solar systems or power company owned systems. I believe that electricity will be much more expensive than we have now.
Man, it's sometimes hard in threads like these to pick out the real trolls vs the heavy sarcasm. Commenting to undo incorrect moderation. We need a freakin' undo.
The economy grew by 400%. That's golden in anyone's book.
Only in the USA were people still seriously considering it being a natural occurrence.
Just how much can you keep putting your head in the sand?
How does a 500 year data set apply to a 4.5 billion year old planet?
This is absurd. Do seconds not matter, because, days, months, years? Earthquakes occur in about a minute or so, right? Seconds, even. How can they apply to a 4.5 billion year old planet? The mass of the earth is about 6E24 kg. Does a scale measuring micrograms not function on the earth? Do single cells of your body not matter because, you know, there are trillions of them?
Here's a page with the basic science and statistics. Educate yourself.
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." - Schiller
The climate cycles on Earth are hundreds of thousands to millions of years long, with smaller variations separated by hundreds to thousands of years. Lesser and major ice ages are examples. So the Lovejoy McGill study is irrelevant in terms of climate science. Climate science is something very few climate "scientists" do. That said, cutting down forests and burning forests is removing a major source of carbon (dioxide) consumption (carbon sink). So CO2 variations (increases for now) are man-made. How CO2 influences the earth's temperature or climate is still not well understood. An example of that is the latest IPCC report, which says that CO2 is only a small driver of Earth's temperature. That is because (climate pseudo-scientists did not realize) CO2 reflects sunlight away from the Earth as well as trapping some of Earth's radiation inside the atmosphere. This is a mostly balancing effect.
If climate "scientists" were doing science, they would tell us that planting trees and forests could reverse the CO2 increase trend (trees eat CO2 and release oxygen). Banning long-term clear-cutting would reduce the CO2 increase trend. Banning slash-and-burn clearing would greatly reduce the CO2 increase trend. Forests regulate the climate in their region, not just under the forest canopy. Tree and forest planting is a simple, easy, low-tech, immediate solution to most if not all of the CO2 increase trend. That does not mean that climate change would stop. A large driver of climate change is the cycle of warm and cold water rivers in the ocean. Their paths appear to have two stable patterns. The paths may currently be flipping from the one stable setting to the other. There does not appear to be anything we can do to affect that.
Another problem is the "storage" of CO2 in the oceans. Oceanic CO2 is stored below the surface, until the below is full up. When the top of the storage level reaches the surface of the oceans, the stored CO2 is released very quickly. The level appears to be temperature driven, and has reached the surface in the Antarctic, with large regions bubbling furiously. This CO2 release could be a catastrophe to animal life on the surface. The saturation of the oceans with CO2 is already a major catastrophe to oceanic life, although there has not been significant study of how much CO2 acidity affects the population of various species. The only way we could fix the oceanic CO2 problem would be to reduce atmospheric CO2 (plant trees), plant forests of green plants in the shallows, and plant floating forests of green plants in the open seas. This would be a very long term project (centuries).
Another way to reduce the atmospheric and oceanic CO2 temporarily is to dump iron dust, iron oxide, and iron sulfate into the ocean. The resulting algae and plankton blooms eat CO2 and feed the oceanic food chain. But that CO2 quickly gets released. so it may not help in the long term.
wake up and hold your nose
Anthropogenic warming isn't dangerous to the planet, it's dangerous to us. The timeline of the planet is irrelevant.
And by analyzing more of earths timeline, we might discover more facts that could reduce the risk to humanity. But no, if they discover something that might counter current scientific beliefs, they might loose funding or even their jobs...
i think we would have to build a whole lot more turbines to compensate for the drag of the trees we have cut down the last century across the globe.
BTW, if there would be nothing slowing down the wind/jet stream, it would be speeding up all the time, approaching light speed eventually.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
We can only power about 10% of the US with wind before we are disrupting the jet stream. Small amount of wind power is good, sure. But it is fated to be a small portion.
Are you just making this stuff up? This is a complete nonsense.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Ah, the awesome combination of towering hatred and towering ignorance!
No, the all-powerful hippies are not holding corporate cowering helplessly in their thrall.
Do you know how many actual, real nuclear power plant projects in the U.S. have been halted by environmentalist opposition? None. Zero. Nada. Zilch. It is impressive in fact how completely all attempts to halt nuclear power plants through protest failed.
But weren't all those nuclear power projects abandoned at the end of the 1970s halted by those d*mned "extreme environmentalists"? Nope. It was lack of electrical demand - those plants were planned under the idea that the rapid growth in electricity consumption of 1950s and 60s would continue forever.
The high capital costs of nuclear power plants make them unattractive investments compared to coal and natural gas plants. Only government subsidies (or a carbon tax) could make them cost competitive. It is good old profit-maximizing capitalism that has been holding nuclear power back.
There are in fact nuclear power plants starting construction right now - Units 3 and 4 at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georiga. The plants project might have started a couple of years sooner - but what was holding it back was were the federal subsidies demanded by the private companies. At the start of this years the final i's were dotted on those subsidies ($6.5 billion in loan guarantees) and the plants are going forward.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The only cure for global warming is money.
...
(Oh, and for you global warming nuts out there: please forgive me for examining this intellectually.)
We "nuts" will forgive you when you do decide to examine this intellectually.
Your current offering fails to even attempt this.
You start with "I may be a bit ignorant on the subject" and then go on to show that indeed, you truly are. To address this "intellectually" you need to actually be willing to do a little hard work - read real research summaries and become familiar with why the objections you pull off the top of your head make you look foolish (hint: they actually are foolish).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Just goes to show you, throw enough poop (i.e. Global warming clowns money) at a wall, and soon you can't even see out the window, and the room stinks. 500 years of data is insignificant. people have been around for a long time. The "Cow flatulence" debate is laughable too......for example, how many Buffalo roamed the plains of north america up til 100 years ago....herds covered entire states (no not the "sissy states" on the east coast, "real men" states like Kansas, South Dakota, and Wyoming sized herds....thats a lot of red meat!!!!! Unless the buffalo were eating LOTs of Beano, probably a bit of methane there too. Umm, the problem here is that we really don't know....it is fun for some to use "incomplete data" to write studies on toilet paper that "prove conclusively" that something is so, but frankly we just don't know. Washington genius has again shut down our space exploration (once thought to be a source of global warming and weather changes!!!!) We now know most "green house gases" come form the mouths of politicians. Simple answer close washington, problem solved. BTW - that is MORE easy to prove than any hokum from environmental socialists. The real "problem" if you want to call it that is the glowing orb in the daytime sky...thats right, the Sun!!! We have no clue how the sun works over time, and frankly since that is what warms this planet and sustains ALL life (contrary to what the libs think) then perhaps studying the Sun and space weather is better use of our time. Trouble is we'd have to divert the "fun money" from washington to do that, and we'd probably stop allowing the Bureau of Land management to harras the rancher out west because of a few desert tuttles.....desert turtles....does that kind of explain how productive the land is for anything OTHER than ranching.....maybe they want the land for some OTHER purpose.....who knows. Desert turtles are like hippies....any surviving of either type had their day in the Sun and should quietly fade away!! HAH
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
You don't understand how science works. If they discover something counter to what we currently know, they'll get more funding to explore this new discovery.
Furthermore, scientists have standards of conduct, transparency requirements and ethics reviews, but the interests opposing AGW do not. And yet you're more skeptical of the transparent science than you are of the unsupported claims of vested interests?
Also interesting that this whole (alleged) "conflict of interest" argument that's used against scientists, applies more to the people opposed to AGW, and yet the AGW-deniers somehow think the latter is just fine, while the former calls into question the scientific data and the conclusions it implies.
AGW deniers are no better than the anti-vaccination idiots.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
"A study out of McGill University sought to examine historical temperature data going back .00001% of the earth's total age in order to determine the likelihood that global warming was caused by natural fluctuations in the earth's climate. The study concluded there was less than a 1% chance the warming could be attributed to simple fluctuations."
Interesting what happens when you plug correct data into the report. They used a variety of gauges found in nature, such as tree rings, ice cores, and lake sediments from the last one ten-thousandth of a percent of the earths age to show they are right. even more interesting is over half of that about was the period of that if they were correct was be considered affected. So to be succinct they fudged the numbers. Its laughable that
“This study will be a blow to any remaining climate-change deniers,” Lovejoy says. “Their two most convincing arguments – that the warming is natural in origin, and that the computer models are wrong – are either directly contradicted by this analysis, or simply do not apply to it.”
when he offers a study that only reviews .00001% of the earth's age. Thats like basing the temperature of a building over the last year on a single hour long visit.
I assume Lovejoy couldn't get access to the antarctic core samples retrieved in 2003 that are 3/4 of a million years old. http://www.newscientist.com/ar...
http://www.rmtrr.org/oldlist.h... talks about the oldest tree rings which date back to 300 BC almost all are in California.
Even more amusing is Sister university UC Berkeley has ancient sediments at the bottom of Northern California’s Clear Lake they pulled in 2012. This is among thousands pulled up in the last 30 yrs.
So when someone actually offers the same info from the last .01% of the earths age, I'll listen. That at least covers an ice age and several geologic periods.
All that will happen is people who actual degrees in climatology will tear his paper apart. But at least its nice to know there are people falsifying climate data just like there are people doing the same to fossils http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/da... https://tumblehomelearning.com...
Hey, I'm all for quitting burning fossil fuels. Give me a cheap form of energy I can burn that doesn't contribute to greenhouse gasses, and I will use it. I can't attach a windmill to my car. I can't run my car on what solar panels put out. There is not enough power from these sources. When people yelp about not burning fossil fuels, they are talking about crashing society. They want to make people suffer. They want everything to stop, to radically change all that is, to force everyone to being a tree hugger. They want you to change your whole life without giving you any better option. They refuse nuclear, even clean nuclear. They want to blight the landscape with windmills, even when the noise and vibration makes you sick and the blades kill the songbirds, they want you to ride a bicycle when you are a geriatric, when its impractical to do so: across thousands or tens of thousands of miles through very deep snow. They want you to suffer, be cold, and die. They don't care about progressing society. They want to wreck it. If we are all dying, at least with fossil fuels you will be warm and comfortable. They are offering you CFL's that leak mercury. They want change but either offer piss poor solutions, or no solutions at all. I have begun to hate them. They protest and sign petitions, but are too lazy to think. They refuse to do the real work of change. That's why I hate them. They claim burning fossils are a free lunch and maybe it is, but insisting on change without offering a viable solution to change to makes them all so very useless.
I agree. People like Lovejoy need to test their idea separate from everyone else for a year. See how it works.
The climate in the UK has been slowly changing over the passed 15 or so years, the extremes are getting wider. I think once all the ice has melted in the polar regions and its no longer feeding cold water in to the seas to keep it relatively cool, the temperatures will rise quicker and more noticeably.
Hmm.
If all of the Antarctic ice melted, sea levels around the world would rise about 61 meters (200 feet). But the average temperature in Antarctica is -37C, so the ice there is in no danger of melting. In fact in most parts of the continent it never gets above freezing. At the other end of the world, the North Pole, the ice is not nearly as thick as at the South Pole. The ice floats on the Arctic Ocean. If it melted sea levels would not be affected.
. I doubt that will happen as it would take a lot more than global warming to melt the ice in Antarctica.
"Reduced it's carbon footprint more than any other" - that's arguable. More likely the emissions have been shifted elsewhere since so much of the stuff North Americans buy comes from Asia and those container ships have horrible emissions thanks to the bunker fuel they burn.
Even if I grant you that "reduced carbon footprint", it's still MUCH too high.
Get the per-capita emissions down to within 20% of the average advanced Western European country and then we'll talk.
Expanding fracking beyond what is now is a HORRIBLE idea; it sucks fresh water out of places that are already in short supply, emits large amounts of methane that have a much greater short-term GWP than CO2 and contaminates the water table.
Instead of repealing income taxes, just cut the defence budget to the $ equivalent of its lowest point during the Clinton administration; cut the DHS budget to 20% of its average since Obama took office and invest that money in job creation.
Solving the problem of nuclear disposal or reprocessing is required before you can build large numbers of new nuke plants which always cost much more and take longer than estimated.
And efficiency measures at all levels should be a priority - and those kinds of new builds & retrofits would create millions of new jobs.
The lack of a carbon / emissions tax has hidden the depth of the problem from the average person. It's telling that most large corporations have been using an internal carbon tax for years - incl Exxon whose CEO has been calling for a carbon tax since 2009.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I do not actually deny that humans are contributing to climate change, so much as refuse to concede that it is any great cause for alarm. If the CO2 content of the atmosphere at the dawn of the Carboniferous Era was around 2000ppm, today's value of 400ppm, while double what it was before the Industrial Revolution, is pretty snall change. And life was thriving at the dawn of the Carboniferous Era, else we wouldn't have today's coal and oil deposits. True, we are returning SOME of the carbon that has been locked away for millions of years back to the atmosphere, but not all of it. Very likely nowhere near enough to cause temperatures to climb to what they were during the Carboniferous Era. A great deal of the oil is used to make plastics, fertilizers and other agricultural chemicals, and the carbon contained in those items is not being returned to the atmosphere. Also, a great deal of the CE CO2 was dissolved into the Earth's oceans and fresh waters and subsequently redeposited as gypsum, limestone and other carbonates. That carbon is not going back into the atmosphere anytime soon either. If the Earth's atmosphere ever does return to the state it was in during the Carboniferous Era, it will most likely be due to extended periods of massive volcanic plume eruptions similar to those which created the Siberian Traps
The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist fears this may be true.
I believe that electricity will be much more expensive than we have now.
In the right areas, PV is cheaper than grid power. The "right area" is growing every day.
Learn to love Alaska
Here is my satirical quote for the day (made from my earlier quotation from the study report):
"There are a variety of gauges for validity of arguments found on Slashdot and other comment-capable websites, such as the amount of insulting and abusive comments made in replies and the lack of true information and argument therein. Fluctuation-analysis techniques make it possible to understand the variations in validity of comments over wide ranges of time scales."
'nuf said.
A few days? It's been cooling for some 15 years now.
Murphy was an optimist
You're absolutely right, of course, and it is, in fact, even worse than this.
Now the new plan is to shut down the coal plants - which were at 89% of capacity last winter - replacing them with NOTHING. Which means the next hot summer, or cold winter, we'll get rolling blackouts and people with no heat and air conditioning. What will happen? We'll burn up oiur fossil fuels faster, of course.
And then we have the ludicrous idea that by taxing the crap out of everything (Carbon Tax), and giving that money to the most corrupt government we've ever had... they will spend that money wisely!! No, a few people will get fabulously wealthy, a few folks will get even more power over our lives, and our freedoms will be reduced. The middle class will become more poor, and the income gap (which has gotten far, far worse under Obama & the Democrats) will get even wider.
And yet most people here are arguing for exactly these things to happen, because? I don't get it.
Murphy was an optimist
Muller looked at station quality specifically, and found that you get the same warming signal using good quality and poor quality temperature stations. But of course you already know this since you are interested in getting to the bottom of the debate.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Sure wish SlashDot would stick to technology. I almost have to take valium to ease the "dizziness" created by your Liberal spin. I'm not going to try to convince you of anything, because liberals are incapable of reason. Some people listen in order to respond (Liberals), while other listen in order to understand (the rest of us). Why would you not mention the funding from Maurice Strong, or "The Tides Foundation" or local Agenda 21 advocates? You tell only part of the story in order paint the picture that helps you to deliver your agenda. We see through you. And you suck. You are pathetic. ----[set FLAME RETARDANT=ON]
Sure, then again that really doesn't mean too much does it. Especially considering the large scale taint of many of the stations over a 30+ year period now does it? And you're just happy to bring up "Koch brothers" because as we all know, one group is all that matters. Never mind Soros, or MM, or OFA, or one of the dozen other left leaning groups.
Om, nomnomnom...
Will, if you want to move from conclusions back to evidence, then it doesn't matter. If you move from evidence to conclusions, then you are simply stating that you know more about Muller's work (and similar work by a large corpus of scientists) then they do. Including all the advanced statistical techniques they used to examine specifically the issue that you bring up. My guess is that you wouldn't even know how to take the marginal of a multivariate gaussian. But hey, you know best. The people who write the blogs you read -- they sure are smart, and tell it how it is. BENGHAZI!!!!
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I already own a Prius; it makes good sense for 99% of my driving being in urban traffic alone. But 500 years is not enough to claim that all climate change is due to manmade sources; you need to go at least 2 million years of climate data to eliminate mankind. And in addition to that 500 years isn't even enough to cover one full ice age cycle. I call confirmation bias on this one.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The AGW advocates always present the AGW discussion as some sort of 'vote' by scientists in which the percentage of something or other is the most important thing. TFA in this case points to a '99 percent' certainty that the world is screwed unless we do what they say. ALL of this is based on computer models of the earth's climate that have not been accurate at forecasting because of their crude modeling of the atmospheric water cycle. Water is the most important 'greenhouse' gas, by hundreds of times, due to its a) prevalence, and b) massive greenhouse effect. But...the AGW advocates ignore the effect of water with their general assumption that a)it's always been there and b) always will be there, and c) does not change and focus all of their attention on carbon dioxide and the hawaiian concentration measurements showing a steady atmospheric increase. However, they completely ignore the carbon cycle. ALL of the carbon that we are exploiting was in the atmosphere in the past and was eventually 'sequestered' through natural processes that continue to this day. ALL of the carbon currently in the earth's crust will eventually be released into the atmosphere, either by the actions of man or by natural processes. For example, there are thousands of locations around the world where hydrocarbons (primarily ch4 but larger hydrocarbons as well) are naturally released into the atmosphere continuously. ALL of the carbon currently in the atmosphere will eventually be returned to the earth's crust. Carbon is constantly being cycled into and out of the earth's crust. Man's exploitation of hydrocarbons are just part of the cycling out of the crust. Moreover, there is absolutely zero evidence that the carbon concentration in the atmosphere is a constant value but rather has obviously changed dramatically over time. The earth's climate may warm over the next century or it may cool (through change in solar output) but there is nothing that we are going to do that is going to change it even 0.1 C. Politically, however, this is an enormous issue because new laws driver by AGW fearmongers will potentially give governments much more power than they already have over the distribution and use of energy. In the United States, we have already seen the beginnings of regulation of carbon dioxide 'pollutant' emissions.
Oh Yes. I know, - since 1998. Like I said above, - that's a popular myth among climate changes skeptics but a myth nonetheless.
Ask yourself this question: What would it take for you to believe in AGW?
No. Really. What would it take? Is it even possible? Does it even matter what the science says as long as you can find a few credible sounding people that disagree?
My guess it doesn't matter how much consensus there is amongst the scientists who study these things. You've closed your mind.
All that they did here was run a statistical analysis on the same flawed, "adjusted" data that Mann used on his initial "hide the decline" fraud. Even if the math here is sound, it doesn't matter because it is all based on deeply flawed, horribly bad data.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Global climate trends take longer than 500 years. Go back to the last ice age and plot CO2 against average temperature. Bet you see something other than AGW.
OK, sacrificing mod points to reply, because this is just ridiculous.
First of all, please quote the actual studies, not blog pages like El Reg. That keeps things much clearer, and minimises the obvious bias possibilities.
Secondly, you compare one study's "likely" 1.64 degrees Celsius rise for doubled CO2 vs another study's "up to" 7 degree rise Farenheit - by the year 2200. Have you ever thought about comparing apples to other apples, or did you just grab two numbers at random to make your comment look more exciting?
Third, there is still no clear agreement as to how much temperatures will rise with a doubling of CO2. Nearly all scientists agree it will go up, and most agree on a rough range for that value, but there is still much debate on exactly what that value is. This is why the latest IPCC report (which surveys hundreds of studies over many sub-fields, giving a much better picture than any single study) says the "likely" increase is anything between 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C (same as the first three IPCC reports), while the "most likely" figure within that range is between 2.5 and 3.5 degrees C. Cherry-picking a single study that posits the lower bound is not a credible way to present your case.
Fourth, you deliberately (and obviously) mischaracterise a study about increased foliage increasing CO2 uptake as "discovering trees eat CO2". This might be news to you, personally, but climate scientists already have a pretty good idea of how much CO2 is currently being absorbed by current levels of global vegetation, and are more interested in finding out how much this might change - in response to increased CO2, or continuing deforestation.
Fifth, a YouTube video, from some random bloke who edited out bits of some other guy's presentation? I'm not even going to bother. Citations of real studies only, please, if you want anyone to listen.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
First of all, they claim that anything about humanity-created global warning is fake, forgery and lies by homosexual, liberal quack-scientists, anf then the Koch brothers will pay for finding "the truth" in the remaining one percent.
Think about it. Could you predict the sentiments of every human on the planet (over 4 billion) by asking the last 500 people born?
I think you need to think about this more. You are arguing that if I want to find out what people think about an issue now, let's say slavery, I should use a sample set that is spread across the entire lifetime of humanity. Is the opinion of someone who died 6000 years ago relevant to the modern view of slavery? Similarly, why would we care about the earth's climate 4 billion years ago, when determining if recent changes are man-made or not?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Ah the instant polarization of the enemy by creating a straw man that doesn't exist, and then declaring that the enemy believes it. You've mastered the Alinsky propaganda tactics quite well, grasshopper, and are to be commended, Please report to the nearest train station - and bring a blanket and a shovel, that's all you'll need!
In the mid1970's, when you were but a gleam in your mother's eyes, I was a Senior in High School, and we were taught that it was SCIENTIFIC FACT that the next ice age was coming. Now the modern re writers of history sell a new version where these teachings were a right wing fantasy - they are liars. I was there, and eagerly read Time Magazine, a leading news source at the time (Before Internet)... who ran story after story about the coming ice age.
In those times the same loons that exist today were claiming anyone who didn't believe in AGC was an ignorant hayseed who was bad for America, that there was scientific consensus, etc. etc.
So what do I believe? I believe that climate science has been so corrupted by greed that nobody really knows what the truth is about any of this. And that the corruption of climate science is one of the greatest crimes perpetrated on the advancement of the human condition. There is ample proof of so called scientists fabricating data to get more grant money. There is ample proof of folks who allegedly care about the human condition becoming fabulously wealthy by running around claiming that the end is near.
I urge you to learn to think with your brain, and not your heart. Learn to recognize propaganda, now re branded as "community organizing" and realize that the people spinning these well crafted, emotional arguments are only trying to part you from your money. Speak out in the name of truth. Learn what real science is, and how it works, not the bullshit that passes for science on the Internet.
Murphy was an optimist
If your opinions are based on "real science" rather than whatever happens to fit your world view, then how is it you could so easily come to a conclusion about my age that is so completely wrong.
Trust me. By the mid 70's I was much more than a "gleam" and I remember the ice age predictions. Perhaps you should go back and see what was being written in SCIENTIFIC publications and the National Academy of Sciences about climate at the time rather than was was being condensed into Time and Newsweek. I have. You might be surprised.
Regardless. The point of my original post is that people like you have made up your mind and it doesn't matter what the science really says. You're going to choose to believe whatever it is you wish. On the bright side, I'm apparently a much younger person in your world.
I'm afraid I'm doing what I told myself I wouldn't, -wasting my time arguing with closed minds.
We can only power about 10% of the US with wind before we are disrupting the jet stream.
You'd have a problem disrupting the jet stream if you covered every square mile of the US with wind turbines, given that the Jet Stream is several kilometers up in the sky, and they don't build turbines much bigger than a couple of hundred meters.
It's not the environmentalists objecting to wind turbines. It's you right wing nutters.
ding ding ding ... we have a winner.
Not literally anyway ...
So a butterfly farting in Canada won't have any effect in the US? This isn't a butterfly effect scenario, though, this is simple thermodynamics. The energy you get bleeds from the current store. Change the flow enough in places, and other places will feel the effect.
The first item on a Google search for "wind power limits 10% usa energy " deals with carbon emission problems scaling wind power
...
this study concludes that a more practical upper limit for wind penetration is 10%. ....
sible wind energy industry in the U.S.”
Existing estimates of the life-cycle emissions from wind turbines range from 5 to 100
report
Also of interest: report
"Each wind turbine creates behind it a "wind shadow" in which the air has been slowed down by drag on the turbine's blades. The ideal wind farm strikes a balance, packing as many turbines onto the land as possible, while also spacing them enough to reduce the impact of these wind shadows. But as wind farms grow larger, they start to interact, and the regional-scale wind patterns matter more.
Keith's research has shown that the generating capacity of very large wind power installations (larger than 100 square kilometers) may peak at between 0.5 and 1 watts per square meter. Previous estimates, which ignored the turbines' slowing effect on the wind, had put that figure at between 2 and 7 watts per square meter.
In short, we may not have access to as much wind power as scientists thought.
An internationally renowned expert on climate science and technology policy, Keith holds appointments as Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and as Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Coauthor Amanda S. Adams was formerly a postdoctoral fellow with Keith and is now assistant professor of geography and Earth sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
"One of the inherent challenges of wind energy is that as soon as you start to develop wind farms and harvest the resource, you change the resource, making it difficult to assess what's really available," says Adams. But having a truly accurate estimate matters, of course, in the pursuit of carbon-neutral energy sources. Solar, wind, and hydro power, for example, could all play roles in fulfilling energy needs that are currently met by coal or oil. "If wind power's going to make a contribution to global energy requirements that's serious, 10 or 20 percent or more, then it really has to contribute on the scale of terawatts in the next half-century or less," says Keith. If we were to cover the entire Earth with wind farms, he notes, "the system could potentially generate enormous amounts of power, well in excess of 100 terawatts, but at that point my guess, based on our climate modeling, is that the effect of that on global winds, and therefore on climate, would be severe -- perhaps bigger than the impact of doubling CO2."
"The real punch line," he adds, "is that if you can't get much more than half a watt out, and you accept that you can't put them everywhere, then you may start to reach a limit that matters." In order to stabilize Earth's climate, Keith estimates, the world will need to identify sources for several tens of terawatts of carbon-free power within a human lifetime. In the meantime, policymakers must also decide how to allocate resources to develop new technologies to harness that energy. In doing so, Keith says, "It's worth asking about the scalability of each potential energy source -- whether it can supply, say, 3 terawatts, which would be 10 percent of our global energy need, or whether it's more like 0.3 terawatts and 1 percent." "Wind power is in a middle ground," he says. "It is still one of the most scalable renewables, but our research suggests that we will need to pay attention to its limits and climatic impacts if we try to scale it beyond a few terawatts." The research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
In order to try to meet a significant level of the earth's current energy usage, airborne turbines are necessary.
"Airborne turbines that convert steadier and faster high-altitude winds into energy could generate even more power than ground- and ocean-based units. The study examined the limits of the amount of power that could be harvested from winds, as well as the effects high-altitude wind power could have on the climate as a whole.
Turbines create drag, or resistance, which removes momentum from the winds and tends to slow them. As the number of wind turbines increases, the amount of energy that is generated increases. But at some point, the winds would be slowed so much that adding more turbines will not generate more electricity.
The group found that wind turbines placed on Earth's surface could extract kinetic energy at a rate of at least 400 terawatts, while high-altitude wind power could extract more than 1800 terawatts. Current total global power demand is about 18 terawatts.
At maximum levels of power generation, there would be substantial climate effects from wind harvesting."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120910143414.htm
Current models, as I understand it, are conflicting in terms of the level of effect of feedback loops. Pulling energy out slows the wind. Slower wind means less energy to pull out, but also localized heating, which likewise makes the location less functional. We are talking orders of magnitudes (yes, plural) regarding disagreement in overall interactive effect, especially between "theoretically possible" and "actually plausible", and "plausible and also non-catastrophic". Without doubt, though, there is a geophysical limit. Also without doubt, somewhere way below the geophysical limit of maximum sustainable drain, there is a region of maximum acceptable ecologic impact. That region is the only region that matters.
I didn't mean that as flamebait. I honestly feel that externalized costs are a determent to the functioning of our market system. Signals get lost. In order to eliminate externalized costs, one way would be to hit not just the corporation but also the owners of the corporation. Otherwise the system is rigged to reward and thus induce externalized costs. This would be direct, effective, and in keeping with capitalist virtues of free-markets as I learned them in MBA school at least.
What I believe is that money corrupts science, and that the money poured into Climate Science has corrupted it so badly that the outcomes of studies are meaningless. That's completely different than where YOU want me to be - A climate change DENIER. I've made up my mind that the believability of both sides is extremely low, close to zero. The contradictions over the years - that you want to hide - are real.
Your overall assertion - which has the underlying tone of words like "people like you" and "You're going to choose to believe" and "You don't study "real science""... this is all based on a philosophy where the enemy/opposition is an ignorant hayseed, country bumpkin, uneducated, ill-informed sort of person who isn't terribly bright, and therefore dangerous. This is a classic propaganda technique. People who practice this technique are not scientists, they are politicians intent on controlling people so they can live aristocratic lives at the expense of others. People who practice this technique have caused more human suffering than anybody else, and I, for one, do not trust their motives.
Murphy was an optimist
You claim to to believe neither side, yet you repeat the (false) claims of the climate change skeptics. You basically admit you're choosing to ignore anyone who could reasonably claim to be an authority of the subject on the basis that they've likely been corrupted by grant money and because of contradictions you and others have exaggerated.
Maybe we should just stop all research that requires money. Surely nothing accurate can come from it.
I agree that not taking a stand either way is pretty convenient. You can disassociate yourself from the worst of the skeptics and chicken littles while at the same time not taking any action.
Has it occurred to you that that is maybe the plan of some of these folks? Create just enough doubt to keep any real change from occurring? Who are the ones really fighting against the idea of AGW? Aren't they the ones living the aristocratic lifestyles?
France and Japan are there, and England is building 38 plants to reduce reliance on Russia's pipeline. By "we", I actually meant the species. Some subjects transcend nationality.
The rational in that post made no sense at all. Knowledge must be based on fact, even if just a seed at the start. Knowledge not based on fact is not knowledge, it is faith which has little place in a scientific discussion. People "believe" in something, but they don't know it with out some concrete basis. One of the first steps is learning the difference between faith and science. I can believe in something because it fits within what I do know, I ca believe in something just because it sounds right, I can believe in something...just because, but I can't know something unless I am able to derive a concrete answer from what information I do have and that information must be fact, or based on fact. No one can know something just because. They can't just know something. That's a belief!. I can know within a given percentage that what "I believe I know is the correct interpretation" In faith, you believe or don't believe, there is no room for statistically saying, this belief is 99% likely to be true while this belief is only 30% likely. It's my faith is right and yours is wrong. We can say (with a great amount of risk) your belief is barbaric and ignores the laws of common decency. Look at the Crusades and "Dark ages". Look at Galileo and the church which is a classic example of the collision between faith, science, and control of power.. One problem today is revisionist history. Science is based on laws and theories. Accepted theories have survived the test of time and gone through many rigorous tests.
At least to start, the same group the Tobacco companies use to combat the health issues were hired to spread confusion and dissent against AGW. Now some of the oil companies "appear" to be coming around. IOW, they see the science as concrete enough they do not want to be seen on the losing side.
My stand is on the side of the scientific method, honesty, truth, and morality.
I refuse to parrot a narrative, and I refuse to deal with people who want to classify sentient beings as "narrative believers" or "the enemy". Such black and white duality has caused so much human suffering I want no part of it.
I'm sorry if that position offends you. I'm insulted that you believe I am "taking no action" -- You don't know squat about me, but if you want to stand in judgement of me based on a few words written on slashdot, then I truly feel sorry for you, I really do.
Murphy was an optimist
I'm not offended by your position at all nor do I see you or really anyone else as "the enemy".
I am curious though. You don't seem to be convinced that global warming is occurring yet you are insulted that I implied that you're taking no action. So what actions are you taking in that regard and why are you doing so?
And if you're not parroting a narrative and don't trust climate scientists, nor climate change skeptics, why would you claim that the climate has been cooling for 15 years? It would seem to me that if you truly doubt both sides, you could come to no conclusion at all about whether the climate has been cooling or warming.
I agree that the current situation resulted not from lack of technical ability but rather due to social forces. I would suggest that one would do better to follow the money to determine the sources of propaganda than to merely make note of protests in the streets.
Or Prius... You realize that electric cars have been going zero to 60 MPH in less than 5 seconds for a very long time now, right? That F150 doesn't have to lack in torque.
I'm convinced that we really don't know what is happening. I do know that many of the claims made 15 years ago by so called "experts" and "scientists" just haven't come to pass.
What I am personally doing? Trying to be a good steward of the land I own, and the waterways I enjoy. Contributing money to causes I believe in. Continuing to read the evidence, but with a very careful eye. Trying to educate young people that things aren't as black and white and they seem, and that science, and religion actually have more in common than they have different. Asking people to look at motivations, and follow the money before going bat-shit crazy.
Murphy was an optimist
Awesome. As long as I can kill everyone and their progeny if despite our efforts, temperatures rise by 3 degrees, I'm game.
On another note, how much proof of of NOT crashing in the next plane do you accept as tolerable for taking said plane? You seem to argue for 0%: we need to be absolutely sure that we are crashing this plane before we refuse to take it.If we survive 1 in a 100 flights, we shouldn't complain. We need to be absolutely sure that we crash this plane before we try to do something about it.
Wrong, we like 'em. They're an engineering marvel. Unfortunately, they produce really expensive electricity. Implement them widely, and the 49 million people in poverty already, and already an unacceptable number, may go to 70 million, or 100 million. Cheap energy is how we live well. If it gets expensive, it's going to kill some people, because poverty is deadly.
I'm aware of plenty of manufactured "scandals" in which no fake or massaged data was ever revealed. In fact, they generally amount to quotations taken out of context and blown to volcanic proportions. Sorry if I don't find this convincing.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Fair enough. I can respect that.
If you like them, then you are either in a small minority, or a very quiet group. Virtually every right winger that expresses a preference want's rid of wind turbines.
As to price, you're spoiled by cheap fossil fuel. But the days of that are numbered, not only because of it's greenhouse gas problem, but because it's finite.
Wind is a genuinely free resource. Fossil fuels were a temporarily cheap resource that's getting more and more expensive as the easy stuff disappears.
Thanks for the sci-fi link. But...
The group found that wind turbines placed on Earth's surface could extract kinetic energy at a rate of at least 400 terawatts, while high-altitude wind power could extract more than 1800 terawatts. Current total global power demand is about 18 terawatts.
You claimed 10% of the USA requirement would disrupt the jet stream. This is theoretical stuff looking at something that would create 100 times more than the current global power requirement.
Case closed.
You are looking at the total amount of energy in the system as the theoretical limit. Obviously if all the energy were removed at once there would be a problem. How much is not a danger? Not 100%, for sure.